The documentation for Mir is growing and we also have instructions out how to get Mir running on your computer, I wanted to briefly summarize the necessary steps to get Mir up and running and how to go back.

Please be warned that while I tried to carefully document all necessary steps you might end up with a system that doesn’t function as expected and which will require further intervention, a reinstall or might even suffer data loss (most likely during the OS reinstall;). Also, don’t use Mir on a production or public system, as there is at least one security related bug.

1. Upgrade to Saucy Salamander

If you aren’t already on the development version of Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander you need to upgrade to it:

4. Enjoy

Mir and all required packages are now installed. You need to restart lightdm which will take you straight back to the login screen and proceed as if nothing has changed (so the theory).

$> sudo restart lightdm

Right now (due to a bug that is almost a feature;) you will recognize that Mir is running by having 2 mouse pointers (HW & SW mouse pointer). This will go away and we will provide you with another more obvious watermark to identify you are running on Mir.You can also simply check if the system compositor process is running:

$> ps afx | grep unity-system-compositor

5. Going Back

There are 2 possibilities to disable Mir on your system, you can either temporarily switch back to run good old X or you can remove all of Mir all together.

Turning Mir on & off temporarily

In order to switch Mir off/on temporarily, one simply needs to manually edit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/10-unity-system-compositor.conf

[SeatDefaults]
type=unity

Simply comment the 2nd line out if you want to turn of Mir and go back to X instead

[SeatDefaults]
#type=unity

If you want to go back to Mir, well, you know what to do. Any change must be followed by a restart of lightdm from a console/VT in order to take effect.

$> sudo restart lightdm

Removing Mir from your system entirely

Please start with disabling Mir as described in the paragraph above. Then, we need to purge the Mir PPA, uninstall all packages from there and remove the PPA from your sources list. ppa-purge is the tool for that task:

$> sudo ppa-purge ppa:mir-team/system-compositor-testing

you might have to install ppa-purge first via

$> sudo apt-get install ppa-purge

Second, while not required, I do prefer to do another update & upgrade to make sure I am not missing on anything:

$> sudo apt-get update
$> sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

6. Known issues

There are many, but we keep fixing them as we find them, here a few highlights:

VT/console switching does not work – bugs 1193207 and 1192429, note that input is dumped onto the VT and you might reveal sensitive information such as passwords 1102756

MultiMonitor does not work yet – not a bug, but a missing feature. I am running Mir on my X220 in a dock in a Mirrored mode with an external display, this seems to work fine

asker

nice, congratulations…when can we expect to run mir with nvidia?

OperEd

Are there any ‘safe’ games that I can try running using Mir currently, please? Or is it too early. I can do a graphics card switcheroo also, if that means greater stability with one GPU company over the other.

olliries

if it runs on X w/o accelerated drivers then it should run on Mir as well – obviously something I hadn’t tested myself. We do run however openarena as a benchmark

OperEd

For a moment I thought OpenArena was a benchmark app, like Futuremark, but I realise now you mean the Q3A game. A game made way back in 1999 isn’t really a serious benchmark. A great game though, which I played far too much.

OperEd

Thanks, I’ll give it a whirl. I’m a Linux noob but curious to see the potential of a stable graphics display server particularly for gaming.

anonymous

Thanks for the straight forward instructions. In 13.10+XMir with a Qt Mir backend installed: Can a Qt application use Mir directly or will everything run through X?

olliries

in the current configuration Qt apps still talk X

greymech

Hi.

Thanks for this. I have had a fresh install of Saucy waiting for this. I am there on it now. some of us on Ubuntu+1 have been trying to mess around with MIR on a PC for a few weeks. Not noticing any difference.

olliries

glad to hear that feedback

James Lewis

Thanks for these details… I tried on my Sandy Bridge Thinkpad, but it gets stuck trying to bring up the display server, and repeatedly puts out this message:-

usbhid 2-1.6:1.0: can’t add hid device: -71

Not really sure what’s going on because if I reboot it actually stops before the ssh daemon gets started so I can’t log in remotely to see what’s going on.

Putting commenting out the line type=unity in 10-unity-system-compositor.conf gets it booting again, but I don’t seem to have any luck otherwise.

Quite likely that those choosing to remove (ppa-purge) will reboot into low graphics. Maybe you should mention they should remove /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/10-unity-system-compositor.conf or comment the entry inside before rebooting..

Go to the terminal and type “unity8″ to start it , not sure how to do it to start on boot.

Hugo

Hope it will be possible to switch the color deph with mir …
It’s really not smart to force 16 million colors on all machines, (despite an human eye can “only” see 6 millions colors ^^) When i started with ubuntu on 2007 the Linux screen was slower than my Windows one !! Just because could not adjust the color depth …
Is it so much work to insert 4 checkbox on the screen parameter window ? ?

Also a manual screen size is sometime usefull for unreconized device, it will allow many people to bypass systeme unexpected weakness …
Something like that :
“Input your customized screen size”
H [______] X L [______]

This could also be soooo usefull for smartphone, allowing almost everyone to adapt is ubuntu screen manualy, we can imagine 5 or 6 Ubuntu for Smartphone version that will feet ALL the Smartphones in the market !!!

But maybe you don’t want Ubuntu to be used widely ? …

http://strycore.com/ Mathieu Comandon

Are you from the past?

Hugo

From earth, 22th century
Do i need to be “from the past” to play games with not less than **!! 50% !!** more graphic ? This is DOUBLE more duty from just changing 16 to 8 (and 140% from 16 to 3 )… Come on, it’s a joke ? I have a A10 5600K with 8Gb ram, and i can’t play Tetris, or Candy Crush on facebook smoothly !!!!!!!!!!!
Who’s from the past ? Really ? I’d say it’s Ubuntu in that case ^^ doing worth than Win 98 (?!!?!!!?!!!)

http://strycore.com/ Mathieu Comandon

People stopped caring about color depth on their desktop between 1996 and 1999, running everything in 24bit. With current GPUs, color depth doesn’t affect performance *at all* (and by current, I mean build after 1996). If facebook games aren’t smooth on your computer then there’s obviously something wrong with your graphic drivers, fix them. (I play Serious Sam 3, Left4dead 2 or RAGE with no problem at all)

Hugo

Typical reaction from a shell that don’t want to move from is rock … It’s a fact, only a fact : Giving less colors to work on give more place to calculate some other things to the GPU … If you give 50% less work to the GPU you free space for smoothing or other task, it’s just a fact …

Maybe you could enjoy Left4dead with more fps rate ? Who know’s … ^^

Secondly i don’t use drivers because they are all supposed to be include in the kernel since few years now ^^ You did know that ? Today Jockey take an unusefull place in the system …

^^

Aditya Raj Bhatt

You should install a binary graphics driver because it greatly increases performance in most cases.

BTW, external monitor is a 15.5″ TV only resolution supported is the max of 1920×1080 hard to read vs. normal 1366×768.

I also have a i386 3.3 gHz desktop and a amd64 notebook for testing ubuntu. Haven’t tried mir on them.

http://owaislone.org/ Owais Lone

Just installed unity-system-compsitor and now I’m not able to lower the resolution. The dropdown lists only the highest option. I’m running a Macbook Pro Retina so 2560 x 1600 is not really an option for me.

Any way to force the resolution down using some config file or something?